What Democrats need to know about the white working class

Excellent article on understanding and communicating with this huge voting block that decides elections. Pruitt describes them as the lowest income working class, those who struggle to make ends meet. They look down upon their non-working neighbors who take public benefits because it isn't fair to those struggling workers. They believe in the American ideal that hard work leads to stability and happiness. And those who don't work are responsible when they cannot achieve it.

Granted they are programmed to think this way by corporations and the upper classes who are responsible for their plight. They are the ones who ship their kind of labor overseas and leave them hanging. They are the ones who keep wages below subsistence level and create lousy working conditions that virtually enslave workers. But they are also good at manipulating this classes valid resentment against non-workers to deflect from the real causes of their situation.

However just stating the above truth with facts up front doesn't get through, especially when seen as coming from the privileged upper class Democrats who they have also been programmed to hate and blame for their plight. Pruitt recommends instead more practical ways to communicate with this class.

For example, tell workers "that their labor is seen and appreciated." Identify them by the kind of work they do, like steelworkers, machinists, food workers. Let them know that you will provide job training programs for them if some of their jobs are going extinct, like coal workers. Let them know how funding childcare helps them to keep their jobs. And quit "belaboring structural challenges," which sound to them like excuses and instead focus on the above solutions.

I'd add that since the working class has already been programmed to hate the privileged upper classes that we also take advantage of that. As the Jan. 6 hearing are so aptly doing, showing how Twitler and his co-conspirators are betraying their trust, conning them out of their money, committing crimes against our country while thinking they are above the law. 

Hard-working people resent those that lie, cheat and steal to get ahead just as much if not more than those who don't work and take public benefits. We need to let them know that their resentment toward the latter is misplaced. We also must let them know that the real cause of their problems are the former who violate their most sacred values of honesty, integrity, law and order and fair dealing.